Eden Onpeng

Work was far from my thoughts as I wandered along the sand on a Wednesday morning, a week after my sister had killed herself. Waves curled and flattened against the shore as I ambled forth, my eyes cast downward in search of calcium-rich remains of mollusks. This morning, the beach—not the city named after the beach, but the actual beach—was deliciously lonely, with only one or two people out on the southern shore, and a few people fishing on the pier.

Then I saw it—a round disc, face-down in the wet sand. I picked it up and groaned with disappointment.

The front center of the sand dollar was broken like a sinkhole, exposing its hollow heart to the world, as dark, watery sand gushed out.

So close to perfection. And yet…

I wanted something whole.

I dropped it back to the ground and continued down the shoreline, between the water and row of tidy rental properties. At some point I found another sand dollar with the five-point grooved star intact on its front center. And then I found more sand dollars, broken and whole ones alike. I kept the whole ones in my linen blazer pocket for safekeeping.

Where were all the people on this sunny Wednesday morning? The kids were probably at school. The adults were at work, or pretending to be. And with the signs telling visitors to KEEP OUT OF THE WATER due to sewage contamination, others were avoiding this beach.

As for me, I was here to say goodbye to my sister.

Victoria died in her dorm room at college after taking a toxic substance. It wasn’t even a fun drug so I couldn’t say that at least she died having fun, or doing what she loved. It wasn’t fentanyl mixed into cocaine. There was only one reason to take it.

I later learned she had spent lots of time scouring forums for information on how to do it. Did it matter if it was the pain that began her journey to find the end, or the pain that led her to finish it?

I researched online to learn what my sister might have felt during her last moments.

As it took effect, she might have felt short of breath, panting for air but without relief. Perhaps she started to vomit in her body’s effort to reject the substance, or developed a throbbing headache. Then the dizziness and lightheadedness set in. At some point she lost consciousness. Her organs began to fail, and finally, her brain, starved of oxygen, died. By the time they found her, her blood had turned chocolate-brown and her skin and nail beds had turned blue due to the oxygen deprivation.

Did her life flash before her eyes during her last moments, before she sank into oblivion?

She was two months away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology.

My sister was quiet and kept a very light online footprint. But in the wake of her sudden death, people came forth to remember her: her fiance and his family, our family and its broken dynamics, our extended family, our friends, and her club mates at school. There are probably others whom I will never know, people who cared about her.

The funeral was open casket. I looked at my dear, sweet sister, and realized: this is no longer her. Victoria, wherever she was, was no longer here, in this gloomy funeral home filled with grief, love, pain, and religious people who used her death to criticize today’s young people for suffering under “modern values” of freedom and independence, and to talk about sin, heaven, and hell. I found none of the sermons comforting.

For several nights after the funeral, I had trouble falling asleep, because I kept envisioning her casket face: face gray, powdery, and flattened; her closed eyes and lips stretched out; eyes sunken in their sockets; and lips too swollen.

She must have been so blue when they found her.

The last times my sister and I hung out were last summer, right after I had stopped talking to my parents. I had realized my parents would never change, and that the same abuses would be covered up again, just like they were two decades ago. I couldn’t trust my parents to not repeat the old patterns with their grandchildren.

To celebrate my sister’s twenty-first birthday, my husband and I took her out to a local brewery along the beach. We ate tacos and drank beers. “You can drink legally now,” I joked.

Little did I know, she had been drinking heavily for years, possibly self-medicating for the pain she must have carried.

Victoria didn’t talk much when we hung out. We would make little playful sounds, like “meow,” to fill in the silence. With all the stuff I had gone through with my parents, I still held out hope that maybe I had borne the brunt of the abuse, that maybe they had mellowed out with age, and were less cruel with her than they had been with me. They had me when they were much younger. They were just figuring it out. They beat my sister less, but beating is not the only form of abuse.

But I had learned to play along. In order to function in the family, I had swallowed my hurts and denied the sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological abuse our parents had wrought upon me—because otherwise my rage and pain would bubble over with each meal, each visit.

I buried my memories and pretended my parents were just stern Asian tiger parents who had meant well but didn’t know how to love. I pretended that only the kind and non-abusive ones existed.

In essence, I had two sets of parents in my mind: the abusive ones, and the safe, non-abusive ones from whom I yearned for approval. I could not reconcile the two. But even then, bitterness would simmer over at times. To preserve the peace within the family, especially while both my grandmother and siblings were living there, I kept shoving those feelings down. Because they were my parents, and it was safer to treat them as the parents I wished they were.

I went through the motions of being family to my parents: Christmases, birthdays, parent holidays, weekend visits, etc. I hugged my mom who had made the entire household walk on eggshells with her violent rages, who had made me drink from her lactating breasts at the age of thirteen. I shook hands with my dad who had groped and slapped my ass all the way until I was sixteen or seventeen. I tried not to think about that. I would smile and make small talk with my sister who sat in the corner on her phone, who did not enjoy hugs, and who was probably suffering her own version of hell in that family but remained quiet because she did not trust me enough because I had played my role too well—

What if, by being too scared to rock the boat, and by playing along for so long, I had normalized the dysfunction in my family? What if, by pretending everything was normal…I had made my sister feel alone in her pain?

In pretending to accept what was broken, I had become part of the very dysfunction that bound the family together. All Victoria could see was what I was pretending to be—a loyal daughter, a peacekeeper, someone who could live with it. She didn’t know I was suffocating too.

And now, in death, she felt nothing. But what did nothing feel like, when there was no more of you to feel or perceive anything? My brain went in circles trying to comprehend the concept of nothingness. Deep down I also hoped there was some sort of an afterlife, where an echo of her essence hung around, hopefully at peace. And maybe one day I would see her again. Or maybe we would both rest in oblivion while existing in the little trail of mementos we left from our lives, and in the memories of the people who loved us.

I made it to the end of the beach, where the strip of sand narrowed until it disappeared beneath some rocks and water. Here, the waves rushed forward erratically. I jumped atop a large rock, narrowly missing a wave as it slammed against the face of a rock wall.

During the last few weeks of my sister’s life, she had written that “my mom kept talking shit about my sister…Trying to pit me against her…Says that my sister should have no reason to hangout with me if she doesn’t hangout with my parents…My mom also told me to not introduce you to my sis lol.” I wondered what my mom had said about me to her over the years.

It must have been hard for my sister to meet with me that last summer at the beach. Our sisterhood and friendship was a secret. We both knew my mom would be unhappy with her hanging out with me on her own. We were supposed to hang out again but she canceled, saying something had come up. We made other plans, but none of them worked out.

A bird competed with me for shells, but it was looking for a quick meal rather than a keepsake. I found a few empty ones and stashed them into my straw bag.

I had reached the end. It was time to return now.

On my way back along the shore, I found more whole sand dollars and thought back again to that last summer with my sister at the beach, how we had combed the beach for shells and sand dollars but had found nothing intact and only broken pieces.

I thought of her and her sun hat, her quiet smile, and all the things we knew but didn’t say to each other. My linen pockets were full and sand dollars stacked atop my hands like wide coins. If she were here, we would be sand dollar rich.